More: A Novel (31 page)

“My mother brought me a cake last week. For my birthday. But I didn’t eat it. You know what I did? I ate the candles!”

Şeref, who constantly spoke to me just like Ender had once done even though I never replied, was in the neighboring bed. In the thirty-four-person ward, I was between a wall and Şeref. No matter how hard I buried my head in my pillow, I couldn’t avoid hearing that cracked voice of his.

After the small scandal in the minister’s office, my unresponsiveness and ghostlike gait had made Bedri decide not to kill me, and flag down a cab for the hospital instead. Since I screamed every time he touched me, however, he’d been at a loss for what to do, and finally got me into the cab by force.

The doctor in the ER, unable to get a reply out of me and observing that I screamed whenever I was touched, scratched his head and said I should be transferred three floors up to the psychiatry clinic. But there was a problem. The first time the elevator arrived, it was vacant and that meant I’d have to be alone with Bedri in there, which I couldn’t do. After several tries we were able to get into another elevator with two people already inside.

I could actually see and hear everything. I was actually aware of everything, but my body and my reactions weren’t mine. They would absolutely not listen to me. For instance, I knew Bedri and I could ride that vacant elevator together, but I couldn’t bring myself to step inside. The part of my mind that was self-aware was trapped in the dark somewhere, observing events from there. It was like it sat in a box in a theater, watching a show it couldn’t participate in. Meanwhile it learned. One of the things it learned was that I could only ride in an elevator if I was alone or if there were at least three people in it besides me. This didn’t surprise the part of my mind that was still aware. It merely accepted it as a newly discovered law of physics and said, “That’s the right way!”

When we got to the third floor, the less I wanted to be touched, the more people tried to touch me. As a result my screams rang all through the hallways and they decided to put me to sleep. I had to be grabbed from all four sides by four aides and wrestled facedown onto a bed so my pants could be pulled down.

When I came back around, Bedri was beside me. I could see him, but I couldn’t talk, because my mouth was full … and anyway, Bedri didn’t appear to want to talk. He stared at me like a poor fool whose house had fallen down around his ears. After all, there was nothing more the little genius he’d invested so much in could do for him. I was a machine he’d never figured out the mechanics of and I’d gone bust when he needed me the most. So I was pretty sure he wanted to stay with me a while longer so he could distance himself from his fury, or at least the urge to break one of my arms. Considering the humiliation I’d caused him in the minister’s presence, you could even say he was being overly generous. He could have just abandoned me in the ministry’s lawn and no one would have been the wiser. He could’ve said, for instance, “He assaulted me and then ran!” But he’d done nothing of the sort. Maybe he still had hope. All of this might just be a minor breakdown. I might revert back to the Gaza he knew any moment, and we could go back to the minister’s to try our luck at an apology. We could start all over again and race hand in hand toward success. However, that meant I’d first have to take my hands out of my mouth. I’d shoved all ten fingers in there as soon as I’d woken up. So they wouldn’t touch anything. “That’s the right way,” said a voice inside me, “that’s the way it should be!”

So neither Bedri nor I could avoid the situation we were in. We were brought to this point by circumstance and stuck there. I was like a taxidermy animal, stuffed up by life before I was even dead. He, in turn, like the owner of a racehorse he knew he’d have to shoot because it was crippled …

There wasn’t much we could do. Bedri stood slowly and started to put his hand on my shoulder. Then he recalled how I’d reacted to anyone who tried to lay a hand on me all day, withdrew his hand, and walked out of the room.

From what I could see from where I lay, he talked to a doctor in the hallway, sneaking glances at me, and then undid his tie and put it in his pocket. He took a step to return to my side, but the doctor stopped him with a hand on his arm. He looked at me a final time before turning around and disappearing down the hallway. There were other children he needed to bring up and a dorm he had to run.

That was the last I saw of Bedri. Our partnership was over. After this, the only thing he could do was keep an eye on my condition from a distance and make sure that I at least received treatment.

“Don’t worry,” said the doctor who came to my side, “You’re going to get better. Then we’ll send you off to Istanbul. I gave my word to Bedri Bey.”

But the doctor wouldn’t be able to keep his word. I never went back to Istanbul, let alone got better. For a person without a family, his city of residence no longer held much significance for the state. Social Services were ubiquitous, and no one thought I should go back anywhere. I’d also unfortunately survived long enough to turn eighteen. With myself … there was no space left for anyone else in my life of eighteen years.

A suitcase with my things arrived from Istanbul a few days later, and I was put on a white van. My destination was decided. A hospital in Gölbaşı. A bed in a thirty-four-person ward, next to Şeref … I’d been there four months and Şeref was still talking:

“So when exactly is it never too late to turn back? I mean, where exactly is that? Because not turning back is also fun up to a point, right? Don’t you think?”

4
   Naturally formed volcanic rock pillars in central Anatolia, used as cave dwellings in 7 AD by persecuted Christians, a major tourist attraction in present-day Turkey.

5
   
Ahad
is
daha
backward, Turkish for
more
.

6
   A religious holiday or feast, on the first day of which relatives and officials alike visit each other and pay their respects to their elders in the form of hand-kissing and pleasantries.

7
   Greeting Turkish nationalists prefer to the widespread greeting of kissing both cheeks.

CHIAROSCURO

One of the four basic techniques of Renaissance painting. Signifies the maximal emphasis of light and dark to separate them sharply from each other. The prominence of the clash between light and shadow results in deeper perception of depth and gives dimension to form.

I’d hidden myself away from everyone and locked all my doors from the inside. The 317 hours I’d spent in hell had been dormant for three years to surface again in that government office and suck me back in. It really was odd that all the commas of my life, that is, its turning points, had to come about in government offices. Maybe I had some sort of allergy to governmental chambers, I really don’t know. All I knew was that I’d really assumed that I had left that black hole behind and been under the delusion that I could go on living as though nothing had happened. When in fact life for me had ended among those rotting corpses and I hadn’t known it. My efforts to go on breathing along with other people had only lasted three years. No matter how much I tried, I hadn’t been able to race fast enough toward the future, and the past caught up with me. In the end I found myself being repulsed by people and stealing Şeref’s capsules of morphine sulfate.

Unlike me, madness wasn’t the only one of Şeref’s problems. He also had brain cancer that he deemed “meant to be!” He had three delightful tumors playing patty-cake with metastasis. These masses, blinding Şeref’s eyes with the light they released into his brain, were sure to kill him. But they wanted to make sure he suffered enough before they did. That was why they flooded twenty-one-year-old Şeref’s body with pains of unendurable weight. The pains would turn Şeref into a submarine, and together they would sink into the depths of his bed. Şeref was given thirty-milligram capsules of morphine sulfate every twelve hours to keep him afloat, but then I butted in. I’d seen what those little blue capsules did to Şeref, and I wanted the same.

When I met morphine sulfate, it was addiction at first sight! All I had to do was look into Şeref’s eyes from where I lay as though I was listening to him. In a brief time, our transaction turned into routine. The nurse who brought Şeref’s capsules didn’t check underneath his tongue, so I could retrieve my share of morphine sulfate after she left. Despite the fact that it was covered with Şeref’s saliva, a
second mouth
capsule was no less effective. Naturally it took a while for him to understand that he was supposed to put the capsule on the stand between us, instead giving it to me directly, but we were all partaking in the initiation period. Şeref had been initiated to me too. He talked to me but didn’t try to touch. In return for the capsules he deposited on the stand, he got a constant listener who stared fixedly at his face as though he were listening. Having someone to listen to him mattered more to Şeref than suppressing the pain flooding out of his skull. In the end each got what he wanted. That meant that we weren’t all that insane. Not all that insane …

The reason it wasn’t thought a medical necessity to give me a single one of the morphine sulfate capsules produced on earth in multitudes was because Emre, the young psychiatrist appointed me, didn’t believe I had any aches. He was absolutely certain that I had no chronic pain. But I was really chronic all over!

Thanks to Azim the archive freak, who’d included my hospital records from Kandalı in my files and painstakingly passed on this official legacy to Bedri, Emre had the majority of information about my condition. Bedri, whom I’m sure must have felt like a betrayed lover, short of hurling my things out of the window of my room on the third floor of the dorm, had been quick to mail every document concerning me to the hospital in a rage of similar vein. So neither Emre nor his young colleagues, despite being informed of my little adventure with the dead at the foot of Kandağ, thought it possible that such an experience could cause maddening pain. That was predictable really, since they’d never been confronted with someone rescued from underneath a bunch of corpses. So to them I was more like someone rescued from underneath rubble after an earthquake.

Emre’s diagnosis, for instance, was definitive:

“Post-traumatic stress disorder, for sure!”

That was what he told his colleagues. In my presence too! And they would at first nod and then rest index finger against jaw in pretense of thought. And the most impatient would start the show named
Contradiction Just for Kicks
:

“But the symptoms have acute properties, no? It’s been three years since the occurrence, but it still seems to be in the acute phase …”

Another would up and start relaying his own dream:

“I believe it can be approached as a subtype of trauma-related social anxiety disorder …”

But no one liked this argument and the chorus kicked in.

“Hmm …” they said, in unison.

Then there was a solo. By a different voice …

“We’re going to Chez Le Bof when work lets out, just so you know. Emre has a crush on the waitress, looks like he’s buying!”

Since the chain was complete, it was Emre’s turn again:

“I don’t have a crush, I just like the way she takes that cloth napkin and puts it in my lap.”

Chorus:

“Hmm!”

The one with the invalidated dream gave one last attempt:

“You have social masculinity disorder!”

But no one cared for or laughed at his little joke and dispersed to different corners of the ward in a figure out of a synchronized dance. After all, there were the ones waiting for a chance to bash their skulls against the wall so they could break it open. True lunatics! Although as a case I was interesting enough, I was no study anyone would spend hours on.

In truth, whatever disorder it was I had, its symptoms were very clear: I could touch no one, let no one touch me, and be alone with no one. I had to either be all by myself or in a crowd. Otherwise I’d start to shake and scream before being suffused by pain that clogged every one of my pores. Aside from that, there was another significant detail: I didn’t speak.

But that was more of a preference. I could talk if I wanted, I might even never shut up, but I had no more interest in expressing myself. Anyway, how many more times was I supposed to? How many more times was I supposed to part my lips to say the same old things like a politician attending rally after rally or a beggar boy imploring with the same words a thousand times a day?

For three years I’d spoken mouthfuls and in the end found myself in a loony bin. It would appear that loquaciousness hadn’t done me much good. It didn’t have any other use than to tire out my tongue. Plus you couldn’t pick a fight if you never talked. Because every word meant a fight. Those who claimed “In the beginning was the Word” were right, because I was sure at this point that fighting came before everything in this world. As many words as there were fights! The ward was filled with savage boxers trying to land punches made of curses from where they lay. A whole bunch of crazies who’d split their brains to hold one lobe in their left hand and the other in their right woke, pretended to be alive, and slept inside one circle.

But you couldn’t say we were that badly off. The psychiatrists’ gang that surrounded us, who were yet of insufficient age to have reached the budget for opening one’s own practice, tried to be as creative as possible in the treatments and discharge us as soon as they could. For instance, my treatment in Gölbaşı went as far as to entail making me observe a birth. Emre, who hadn’t covered much ground with his PTSD theory, had decided to go with the flow completely, crossing over to the world’s most scientific method, trial and error. Of course having me watch a birth had been Emre’s idea, but there was a problem with the application. It wasn’t very easy to find a pregnant woman who’d volunteer for something like that. Since there wasn’t someone around dying to have some lunatics watch her as she gave birth, I had to make do with recorded images. Maybe it was in everyone’s best interests that this technicality kept me from witnessing any births. I was sure I might feel an irresistible urge to shove the newborn right back where he came from.